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New York Theatre Ballet in Song Before Spring<\/em> by Zhong-Jing Fang and Steven Melendez. Clockwise from R: Melendez, Amanda Treiber, Elena Zahlmann, Carmella Lauer, Daniel Salas, Alexis Branagan, Joshua Andino-Nieto, Mayu Oguri, Photo: Cherylynn Tsushima<\/p><\/div>\n Young choreographers are usually advised to start out \u201csmall.\u201d You know, try their wings. Diana Byer, the artistic director of the fine little New York Theatre Ballet, took the opposite tack. According to an interview with Steven Melendez, a dancer in NYTB, and Zhong-Jing Fang, a member of American Ballet Theatre\u2019s corps de ballet, Byer put them together to co-choreograph a new work and chose the music for it: Philip Glass\u2019s Piano Etudes, Nos. 1-10<\/em>, slightly re-ordered and played by New York University\u2019s ten-person Steel Drum Ensemble (director: Josh Quillen). Running time: 48 minutes. That the resulting piece, Song Before Spring<\/em>, works as well as it does is something of a triumph.<\/p>\n I missed the piece\u2019s premiere at New York Live Arts in February, but saw it in Jacob\u2019s Pillow\u2019s Doris Duke Theatre this first August week, with its score played live. It\u2019s a big, vivid, dramatic, occasionally perplexing piece that, toward the end, strains to fill Glass\u2019s ongoing music. You want both to applaud it and calm it down so you can ask it a few questions.<\/p>\n In the effective opening, members of the Steel Drum Ensemble walk to their upstage lineup at a moderate pace, silhouetted against a blue-lit backdrop. Wearing black, even when illuminated, they take little attention away from the dancing, even as they play their steel pans (plus several drums) with terrific rhythmic acuity (no conductor). The sound is remarkable.<\/p>\n Choreographing what I gather was a first piece for both Melendez and Fang, they clearly had a narrative (or narratives) in mind. Adhering to the music\u2019s sectional structure, they developed ideas that don\u2019t always cross the boundaries between etudes, so the effect is of a sprawling saga, like one of those novels that weaves the stories of several families together through alternating chapters.<\/p>\n We can tell from the outset that this is a troubled community. The dancers, standing with their backs to us, begin a series of staccato moves\u2014flipping a hand out, arching backward, etc. They\u2019re not in unison. One of them (Mayu Oguri) is seated, which invites us to consider her as different in some way. Two men eventually help her up. This kind of assistance happens often and introduces a theme that runs through the piece: these people are concerned about one another. Often a dancer (usually a man) puts an arm protectively around another (usually a woman) and leads her away. Sometimes one carries another as if he\/she were a tired child. A stranger event: one person leans his\/her forehead against another\u2019s chest and waits for what will ensue.<\/p>\n There are private encounters. Joshua Andino-Nieto and Daniel Salas embark on a demanding, intricately involved duet with acrobatic maneuvers (one flipping the other into a back somersault, say); their tangles could be combative or just a bit of friendly roughhousing, but there\u2019s nothing convivial about Salas helping Andino-Nieto and then more or less dragging him away by the neck. Amanda Treiber and Alexis Branagan (delightfully buoyant in this) dance at each other in a playful, conversational, girlfriendish way.<\/p>\n Elena Zahlmann in Song Before Spring<\/em>. At back: Members of New York University’s Steel Drum Ensemble. Photo: Hyim Heron<\/p><\/div>\n Some characters in this story reveal themselves in heavily emotional solos. The one performed by Melendez is the most nuanced of these; he frequently curls in, clutching himself as if in pain, but he also sees something offstage that affects him, and seems, as he kicks and twists, to be struggling to express (or control) a barrage of feelings. Elena Zahlmann is dragged in by the men, dumped, and left alone on the floor. That she wears a short red satin dress, and her hair hangs loose brands her as the village adulteress (or someone in disgrace); she dances how deeply unhappy she is and stares at the audience as if to ask our help. (Later in the dance, she has sloughed off that identity and is again one with the group).<\/p>\n Ignoring one another or helping those in need, clustering to watch or dancing exuberantly (with few stringently balletic steps beyond leaps and arabesques), the performers are fully engaged in the mood of whatever they are doing and doing it extremely well. There\u2019s almost always something of interest to watch. In certain ways, the elusiveness of the drama is interesting in itself\u2014as if we were seeing it through veils, but that can also be troublesomely puzzling. Why, for instance, does Oguri appear briefly wearing the black jacket that, I think, belonged to Salas, as if doing so were of no consequence?<\/p>\n Given the title, I understand why the dancers eventually exchange their mostly monotone clothes (costumes by Sylvia Taalson Nolan) for brightly colored shirts and dresses: spring has come! But why do Carmella Lauer, Branagan, Oguri, and Zahlmann cluster around Treiber and garb her onstage in a deep pink gown that\u2019s longer than anyone else\u2019s? She\u2019s featured prominently throughout; what is she being prepared for now? What does it mean that Branagan stands on Salas\u2019s chest, gazing around while he lies supine with his legs in the air, and Andino-Nieto lifts Treiber?<\/p>\n Song Before Spring<\/em>. L: Amanda Treiber and Joshua Andino-Nieto. R: Alexis Branagan and Daniel Salas: Photo: Cherylynn Tsushima<\/p><\/div>\n There\u2019s a kind of energy in this dance as a whole that\u2019s endearing, as if choreographers Melendez, and Fang had a plethora of good ideas they wanted to try out. For a few seconds, women form a chain by sitting within one another\u2019s slightly spread legs; the men do the same. Nice, but what does it tell us? Or lead to?<\/p>\n Cavils aside, congratulations are in order. As a maiden voyage, Song Before Spring <\/em>is an accomplishment.<\/p>\n The NYTB closed its Pillow program with a masterwork that has been in its repertory for some time: Antony Tudor\u2019s 1937 Dark Elegies<\/em>, as staged by Donald Mahler. The Doris Duke isn\u2019t the ideal place to see this spare, heart-wrenching piece; the dancers perform in front of a blue-green cyclorama, rather than Nadia Benois\u2019 two original\u00a0 seascapes, which reinforced the memory of death by drowning of which the beautiful music\u2014Gustav Mahler\u2019s Kindertotenlieder <\/em>(Songs on the Death of Children)\u2014tells. Too, the space is so intimate that baritone Darren Chase can\u2019t be viewed (at least from my seat) as truly part of the community (he is costumed like the male dancers); he stands over to one side in front of the proscenium with Michael Scales, who plays the reduced score for piano.<\/p>\n Mayu Oguri in Antony Tudor’s Dark Elegies<\/em>. Photo: Cherylynn Tsushima<\/p><\/div>\n Never mind. Every time I see this spare, bleak ballet, I find new beauties in it, and the NYTB dancers perform it with admirable clarity and restraint, as well as a sense of how Tudor set his choreography to the music. Felix R\u00fcckert\u2019s German lyrics tell of the families\u2019 anguished responses to loss. A mother, entering her home, unconsciously looks at the place where her daughter ought to be. Another parent laments the fact that, with a storm brewing, the children should have been kept at home. They try to comfort themselves: \u201cI often think: they have just gone out!\/ Soon they will be coming home again!\/ It\u2019s a lovely day! O don\u2019t be afraid!\/ They are just taking a long walk.\u201d<\/p>\n The twelve dancers are plainly clothed (costumes by Raymond Sovey, after Benois). The women wear head scarves, the men sweater vests. And their movements are constrained. As is often the case in Tudor\u2019s ballets, they hold their arms down by their sides much of the time, but in Dark Elegies<\/em>, the women sometimes walk gripping one forearm with their other hand, as if they were literally holding in their grief. The two women who perform solo lamentations and the one who dances with a partner wear pointe shoes (disguised so as not to stand out), which emphasizes the precariousness of their emotions: balance becomes a test of courage; they leave only a small, sharp footprint.<\/p>\n Simple dances in chains or in a circle stand for the everyday life they are trying to hold onto\u2014their grave customs, their consideration for one another. But their feelings break out. Oguri suddenly collapses to the floor. Lauer rushes toward her partner (Melendez); jumps, arrow-straight, into his arms; and instantly crumples. This woman also lies down, imagining death, and Stephen Campanella and Andino-Nieto step up to help Melendez lift her, supine, as if onto a bier. Once set down again, she runs all the way around the outside of the circle that others have formed before continuing out of sight.<\/p>\n The women in Antony Tudor’s Dark Elegies<\/em>. Center: Carmella Lauer. Photo: Cherylynn Tsushima<\/p><\/div>\n Tudor doesn\u2019t give the dancers ballet\u2019s rounded gestures. They angle their arms or open them wide; they clasp their hands. The women are slightly more stoic than the men. When Zahlmann finishes dancing to the fourth of five songs, she bows to each of the groups watching her, as if to ask their pardon for her outburst. The two sections featuring men are harsher and more distraught. Campanella jumps over and over; Andino-Nieto\u2019s limbs and body seem to wrench him in different directions.<\/p>\n But all these people accept the tragedy as a part of life. And at the end of Scene Two, they formally join in pairs and walk out, leaving the woman who performed the first solo to trail behind, repeating her opening motif).<\/p>\n![\"Elena](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/AJ-in-red-NewYorkTheatreBallet_2016hHeron_-9.jpg\")
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